Since I don’t have any other place to put the ones I like, I’m posting here. The other day we went to see the (almost gone) cherry blossoms at UW, which has become a tradition for us (see other blog).

Here’s another of Mr. J playing with chalk outside. Chalk is a big hit at our house. Except when it goes away after it rains. Then it’s a sad day.

Sidewalk Chalk

The toddlers are hard to get in focus on the iphone and the wee infants are getting hard as well. Notice the blurry arms.

Cjay and Slanky

My friend Kara, who’s son Phoenix is one of Jonah’s closest buddies, told me that Phoenix said he’d like to name his little brother Jody! His little brother will be here in May.

Luckily for them, Jody spelled with a “y” is how you spell the boy version of my name so it’s really all covered.

So I hear it’s not uncommon to have some wild and crazy dreams while pregnant. This woman I sit next to in class who is pregnant told me she regularly dreams that Satan is telling her he’ll be coming for her soon. Fortunatly, Satan has not visited my dreams, but for the past I’m not sure how many weeks, I’ve had, on average, one to three very vivid, usually at least slightly weird dreams per night. Sometimes they are about people I know or once knew, sometimes I cannot figure out where the people may have come from – someone standing in front of me in line? Last night I dreamt that I was at Rio Disney (pretty sure that’s not in the plans of Disney expansion…) and randomly met up with this family who used to go to the preschool I worked at in Bellevue. I ended up taking care of their little girl and we were having fun swimming with unicorn fish in a ‘jungle’ pool until some kid taunted a large water snake who then jumped into the pool – at which point my dream stopped, maybe due to Jay waking me? (which apparently happens more than usual due to thrashing around/making loud noises on my part as I sleep) By far the weirdest and most disturbing dream occurred a few nights ago when, in my dream, Jay decided he had to poison someone who had done some (now unremembered) bad thing. In the dream, I found out about it and then became afraid I would be next so I decided to beat Jay to the punch and poison him first. Then when the effects of the poison began to take hold I started screaming and called 911 to come save him. Paramedics soon appeared, all of them well-known movie stars. They revived Jay and took him to the hospital, at which point my dream transitioned into a new one in which Jay and I were looking at new homes to buy… with huge backyards that had large raspberry beds (a key factor for any house we would even consider buying)… bizarre…

I’ll shamelessly tell anyone that House MD got me through the first month or so of breast feeding with Jonah.  I believe I watched about 4 seasons worth during those epic feeding sessions.  This time around I’ll gladly thank the Olympics for getting us all through that first couple weeks.

I have to admit, I haven’t ever been a big fan of the Olympics.  They’ve never really interested me in any kind of meaningful way.  I’ve always chalked that up to not really being a very big sports fan.

Perhaps because they were happening so close to home in Vancouver B.C. (or perhaps because we were sitting around a lot at weird hours!) everyone at my house got into the spirit of them.  Annoying patriotic crap aside, I found some of the cheesy stories about the athletes appealing, I liked watching a number of different sports and evenings really became a family bonding time when we’d watch to see what new skier would bite the dust or my mom would say, “Oh no not curling again!”

I really liked how Evan Lysacek handled the negative comments from the Russian silver medalist.  He so gracefully turned everything into something positive and refused to making anything of them.  I believe I have a little crush on him now.  He and other athletes showed so much more humility than I’m used to seeing from our “star” athletes we see on tv every day.  I really liked that.

Jonah even liked some of the events and when he saw some skiing he said, “I go snow with Kayla,” reminiscing about going to Snoqualmie with his friend.  When he watched a skier crash he got really concerned and we had to explain that she was ok and getting help.  Shows he’s not a psychopath, right?

And now for the musical portion of this post…  Turns out a song used in an Apolo Ohno commercial is from an album we own and the tune is quite catchy.  It also sounds like the Olympics to me, if that makes any sense at all.

It’s from a group called The XX and is the intro song to the album. The album itself is pretty good too, using a lot of electronics and catchy beats. I plan to give it more playing time soon.

When I type I always put two spaces after each period.  It annoys slanky, so much so that when he was editing our new year letter he went through everything I wrote, which was practically the entire document, and took out all of the “extra” spaces (I think he also did this last year but didn’t complain quite so much so I promptly forgot all about it).  I learned to type in high school, on a type writer, and that’s what I learned.  Period, space space, beginning of next sentence.  Apparently, this is no longer the traditional typing method and in the digital world only one space after a period should be used.  We got into quite a discussion about it and here is what we found:  Double spacing at the end of sentences.

So we were all supposed to switch to the “french” spacing at some point in the last decade or so and I’m wondering how many of you have made the alteration.

One space or two?

I LOVE poached eggs.  Yellow, soft, warm, runny, what’s not to love?  Okay, well, apparently some people (Pat) do not love them.  Actually, that does not adequately describe Pat’s feelings towards poached eggs.  They completely gross him out, and I think he’d rather eat grass than poached eggs.  Which makes me curious, how do my fellow Roses feel about poached eggs?  Anyway, despite my adoration for poached eggs, I did not make them very often because they can be such a pain.  Until I came across these fabulous little silicone egg cups at King Arthur Flour.

Ingenious!!  I coat the cups with a little butter and the eggs slide right out of the cup.  No mess, no fuss.  Hooray!  I enjoy poached eggs a couple of times a week now.

And on another note, the butter in this picture is Bordier butter I picked up in Paris when we were there last June with the Stewarts.  I froze a couple packages, and that was the last of it.  Sigh.  The Moveable Feast people are a bit wrong about the butter, I think.  I personally was not a huge fan of butter (other than being a firm believer in using loads of it when baking) until I tasted the Bordier Butter.  Amazing.  Instead of the thin, meager layer of butter I normally put on toast, with Bordier butter I spread on an overly generous, very thick layer.  (white bread is best, but on this particular day I only had brown on hand).  And then lick the butter knife afterwards.  Though again, like poached eggs, there are apparently differing opinions on the fabulousness of Bordier butter (weirdos).

Not only is the iphone useful for music collection but it’s also a fun artistic tool! I’ve been loving seeing emilyfrances’ iphone photos on facebook and I’ve been doing a little experimenting myself, though I think I have a long way to go to make anything very artistic! I randomly picked a few photo apps to spruce up the photos and so far it’s been really fun.
My main problem with the iphone camera is that I like trying to take pictures of people with it and moving objects just don’t work very well. Even so, I’ve gotten some really cute ones of Jonah (and Jonah and Lila) in the past so I’ll keep trying.

Here are a few experiments so far:

Slanky and the red balloon

On the deck

Corbin, 3 days

As you all know, Gaje has been a part of our lives for a long time now. He turned 10 this November so that means we’ve spent a decade together. He was our first responsibility other than ourselves so I guess you could think of him as our practice run at children. He’s only a little quirky so I suppose that’s good news for our boys.

Yesterday we took Gaje to the vet to have major surgery. He’s had an exponentially growing lipoma on his side for the past two years and upon the advice of a vet we decided to have it removed so that it doesn’t start affecting his health before old age does. The surgery is risky but a common one for dogs, luckily Gaje did just fine and we get to pick him up today. The recovery will be about 3 to 4 weeks and he’ll be a fraction of his former self, which is a good thing.

These decisions are hard. This surgery is costing us a lot of money. He’s a dog. But he’s been a part of our lives for so long it’s hard to think about anything other than giving our all for his care. I’m so thankful that we have the means to do so. It’s hard for me to think about a time when he’ll no longer be here with us, sharing in our family moments, so instead I’m going to think about all the good times we’re going to have after he’s healed.

Gaje on his new bed